It's about time we had some more culture around here. Since it's the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death on Saturday, here is a 30-day meme about the Bard; feel free to chip in or copy as you like.

This is not very difficult: it's Hamlet. To repost most of what I said about it a few years ago, this is pretty much the pinnacle of Shakespeare's literary powers, and has been rightly regarded as such for centuries. A lot of this is because of the fascination of the central character, advised of his father's murder by his father's ghost, and then taking a troubled but compelling path to vengeance, which ends up not only with his own death but also those of his father's murderer, his mother, Polonius and both his children, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Also, of course, the language is amazing. This play surely has more famous quotes per page than any other, most of them short phrases that neatly bracket some concept - "a consummation devoutly to be wished", or "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". It's occasionally rather startling to hear the original context of some commonplace line, though it doesn't really jar the play.

Apart from the main plot, I find two interesting themes in the play. One, not surprisingly, is death. Everyone is talking about it, from the king to the gravedigger. Depending on how you count Julius Caesar, this is the first non-historical play with a ghost. We end up with the stage littered with corpses, and I think there are more on-stage killings than in Titus Andronicus - and unlike Titus Andronicus it isn't over the top. (It's also difficult to deny that there must have been some connection in the author's mind between the title character and his own son Hamnet, who had died a few years earlier aged eleven.)

The other theme I picked up was the theatre. It's not just the play-within-a-play (though that is more interesting here than the comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream, let alone the peculiar unfinished framing narrative of The Taming of the Shrew); it's the conversation of the players with Hamlet before the show, and the final discussion between Fortinbras and Horatio about telling the story and displaying the bodies. Shakespeare isn't overdoing it, but he does seem to want to make us think about what the theatre is and what is happening when we are watching (or in this case listening).

I first saw it as a (somewhat cut) school production in 1979 when I was 11 or 12. I think I may have seen a student production in Cambridge as well. I enjoyed the David Tennant version (and I want to do a fanvid some time cross-cutting between him and Derek Jacobi in the 1980 version, where Lalla Ward was Ophelia and Patrick Stewart was Claudius).

But I want to particularly mention a great stage production I saw in Brussels 18 months ago, "Hamlet Unplugged", which had just four actors, each playing Hamlet in turn, and speaking only Hamlet's lines, everyone else miming the other parts. It was brilliant.

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Mid-summer Nights Dream; of course this is greatly influenced by having seen Peter Brook's legendary white production with Vanessa Redgrave and Alan Howard. Never before - or since have I left the theatre feeling like I was flying.

Have copied the list but am not sure I have the energy for posting, so here's the comment version:my favourite play is Much Ado About Nothing. I first saw it with Samantha Bond and Kenneth Branagh, in the 1988 Renaissance Theatre production that was directed by Judi Dench. We arrived very slightly late, thanks to the M40 - before curtain up, but too late for a moderately large school party to be seated without significant delay to everyone else - so watched the first half while standing at the back of the theatre. It was a good sign that come the interval, we barely realised we'd been standing for so long. Quite a few of us didn't want to go and sit down for the second half. (Good preparation for when the Globe opened some years later...) They had kept us completely enthralled - even those of us who hadn't been paying much attention when we were reading/acting the play the previous week. Although I was quite a fan of Emma Thompson I didn't like the [Branagh] film as much as the play, because of the lack of Samantha Bond. She's still my favourite Beatrice, even now I've seen rather a lot more. And it did have Keanu Reeves in it, which is never a good thing. But I love the arrangement of "Sigh no more, ladies" - and have been known to sing it at folk evenings - and still find it a good comfort watch. Joss Whedon's B&W adaptation makes me laugh a lot - there's a lot of good characterization in there - and in the cinema it was awesome. It loses a little on the TV screen, but not enough to make it unwatchable.

The things that make it my favourite probably come under other days' categories. :)

Hamlet is excellent, but my favorite is and has always been The Tempest. Even used that as my final performance exam when I took a drama/acting class: I strung together three of Prospero's monologues to show the progression from Prospero the nigh-omnipotent wizard to Prospero the man looking for a simple retirement.

I think I'd also go for MND (with the caveat that there are four or five plays I still haven't seen or read). Hamlet is probably his best play, but I love the atmosphere of MND, Puck's closing lines, and the earnest way the mechanicals approach their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe - and the respect Shakespeare seems to pay them with his gentle mockery. I love the focus on seeing, eyes, and perception.